John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have written of the so-called "social life of information" — the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it.
Another popular approach is to write a set of rules that classify all the words and clauses likely to be encountered in a text as having positive or negative implications, and then using the rule book to mark the text accordingly.
This compunction, which I encountered in a text accompanying an engraving of the same subject in a current show at the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C., of about fifty Homers from the museum's collection, surprises me not for its content but because I don't think of the extraordinarily stolid Homer as having opinions.
On such a view, which set of propositions constitutes the set to which a given agent is related by encountering a fictional text depends on contingent facts about what their world is like.
Barthes says that photography incarnates "the presence of the thing," but what can that mean when it comes to a photograph whose authority we doubt, and that we encounter in a text that is a hybrid of document and fiction?
Encountered a smelly hobo?
Without this conceptualisation, there is a danger of language being considered purely a generalisation over previously encountered texts, a view deemed inadequate for linguistic theory ever since Chomsky's (1959) criticism of behaviourist psychology as applied to language.
He explains that they will shortly receive a text message reviewing their encounter with a local official.Even among the poorest fifth of households, 80% now use phones, so the technology can reach almost everyone.
Perhaps an instructor feels that the shock of an unexpected encounter in a text with troubling material is part of the pedagogical effect she is trying to achieve.
When we see a text version of the Gettysburg Address, that text says mind to us in a way totally unrelated to any induction or analogy from past encounters with written texts.
